Monthly Archives: January 2012

Suffering as Retention of the Past: Part 2

Posted on by

If you study Kabbalah carefully, one of the things that becomes immediately apparent is the reality that the Tree of Life, the very structure of our experience of life, is constantly in movement. It’s to be remembered that movement is the sign of life itself. Motion within the Tree of Life is everywhere. The whole structure of life emanates one level from the previous one. The Sefirot are constantly unfolding and then interacting with each other. There are multiple interactions between the levels and within the Sefirot themselves. Time and Space are in constant motion. The Kabbalist Tree of Life, the whole of reality, then, is the continuing experience of the Present.

The Past, from a Kabbalist perspective, is the record of how reality has been experienced already through the actualization of the choices we have made and the repercussions that have emerged from those very decisions. The past is a very vast, rich and important archive of information, which is meant to be used as a tool for learning and for soul development. It is not, however, a living reality and should never be confused with or allowed to interfere with the Present. The present, to be clear, is life experience itself, not the record of how it was lived and what the ramifications of our actions were. 

The great danger in doing so, in being overly fixated on the past, is that you can get overly identified with what was reality at the expense of what is actually happening now. To be caught in the past or worse, to be living in the past, is to be experiencing life through a merciless and unchanging filter.

The Kabbalah teaches that the past is unchangeable as a reality. It functions as a record and its job is simply and effectively to preserve experience and information. It is essentially a closed book, a chronicle and an archive. The Past is to be studied and learned from. It cannot be relived or worse lived in, because it only represent life as it was, not as it is. Therefore if you are overly focused on the past, your perception of life is being filtered through a lens that is projecting onto your life a picture of what has been, not what is. It is doing so at the expense of objectively seeing what is actually transpiring. Your life experience is being colored and distorted by a non-reality.

What one learns from the Kabbalah is that focusing on the Past only perpetuates what was. If you are  living in the past, the problem is often that you are trying to alter or heal negative and damaging experience by dwelling on it. You may be ruminating about it in order to try and effect a meaningful change. The reality here is that you cannot impact or alter the unchangeable. Fixation on the past only reinforces and perpetuates old patterns. So, if the old patterns were painful, damaging and destructive, then by holding on to the past reality only adds energy to the filter and exacerbates matters considerably.

From the Kabbalist perspective, suffering in our lifetime is often caused by this continual distortion of our present life experience due to the imposition of old psycho-emotional patterns from the past. If we are seeing and feeling what was over and over again in our lives, we are not able to see or feel what is truly happening now, in present time. The clear reason is that the past model, being constantly maintained, is overriding much of what could be seen and felt that is generated by current life circumstances.

Stuck or fixated in the past reality totally eclipses being in and experiencing the Now.  You cannot be truly present and creatively, vibrantly alive, if stuck in the immutable past. This is because your energetic focus is tied up, continually recreating and reinforcing what was. All you are doing is regenerating trauma and trying to animate and change a frozen emotional reality by accepting it as the constant.

What picture is in front of the lens is what appears on the screen. If your focus is in the past that is continually what will be on the screen of your life. It will never change. Like a slide in a projector, the past is static. As the Kabbalists

Studying Kabbalah

Working with the Kabbalah for Over 30 Years

say, “Consider this point well.”

Suffering as Retention of the Past: Part 1

Posted on by

In Kabbalist thinking, one of the most pervasive means of creating suffering, particularly for oneself, is to become or remain focused in the past. Extensive preoccupation with what was or what has been creates an enormous distortion in our perception of life. We end up seeing the events around us in a way that is generally inappropriate and deceptive; therefore in a manner which can be very destructive.

Just as physically, we cannot be in two places at the same time, on a psychological level the same holds true. The cognitive mind can only be either in one place or another, not in both simultaneously. So, if our primary attention is frequently preoccupied with the past, it is simply not in the present. To be too consciously centered on what was is to be displaced from the reality of present time and experience. This displacement causes great suffering and psycho-emotional anguish from the Kabbalist perspective.

When we think too frequently and too intensely about what has happened to us in our lives, what takes shape subconsciously is the emergence of a specific life picture predicated on the past. This focus on what was, creates within us a fixed way of looking at ourselves and the world, which can become our whole frame of reference in life. By overly focusing on the past, we give more and more energy to creating a specific view of our life based on was rather than what actually is.

The Kabbalah sees the Tree of Life not only as the structure of creation, but also as the process of creation. The two dimensions, process and structure, are two sides of the same reality. What that means simply is that space-time and movement are all the same thing manifesting simultaneously. Without space-time there is no movement. Without motion, there is no time-space. Reality does not occur otherwise. Reality is the Present, no more no less.

The Kabbalist view is that Creation itself is the Now, the Present as we experience it.

The Tree of Life is the Eternal Moment playing itself out. The past and the future are not reality per se, only aspects of the Now. They are not realities in and of themselves, because our experience of life takes place in the present. Past and Future are just dimensions of that experience.

What we experience in life is not only happening to us, but it is also being recorded and internalized within. That process of storing and preserving our experiences is critical in ordering, evaluating and understanding ourselves and our relationship to life.

The problem arises when we move beyond those boundaries and get fixated mentally and emotionally on what has happened, instead of on what is actually transpiring. In Kabbalah, this shift creates great distortion, because what was does not necessarily constitute what currently is.

The present is reality. The past is merely a segment of a much broader picture. To focus on the past is to be centered on a fragment of reality, rather than on the now, reality itself. To do so produces a displacement of consciousness and with it tremendous distortion, damage and suffering that we are creating for ourselves.

Rabbi Fisdel maintains a Spiritual Counseling practice in Albany, CA  working with individuals of all spiritual backgrounds and traditions, both locally and long distance. Steven has been counseling, teaching and writing for over 30 years.

www.classicalkabbalist.org